Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

May 29, 2014

I recently saw a little bit of hype about a new search engine called WbSrch Web Search and decided to take a look at it. It's a free text search engine (like Google and Bing - type in what ever you want and it'll search on it) and it's similar to DuckDuckGo in that it doesn't track you. It comes in 25 different language flavours, and it does its own internet trawl for new sites to include - it's not using a subset of Google search.

And... that's about all that I can say which is positive. Search functionality is limited to typing in some words and I quote "There's nothing fancy you can do - no boolean operators or the like." There is no image search, video, news - just standard webpages. And not that many of those either - a search on 'library' returned 250 results. That's it. Several other searches that I ran gave no results at all, so it's still at a very early stage of trawling the net. The SERPs were awful to look at - it was like something back in the 1990s.

One thing that particularly struck me was their rudeness and arrogance. Try a few of these quotes, taken from their FAQ. "If you're in a hurry, we're sorry. Improvement takes time." "What if I look up my domain and find that my site was wrongly excluded from the index? Tough cookie. There is no appeal or review process." "we don't do social media."

They might be trying to be all hip and devil may care, but to be honest, they just look rude, unhelpful and very unprofessional. I really wouldn't recommend them, and I suspect that within six months they'll be dead. Which will be no particular loss.

You may have heard of the Google Chromecast gadget - I got one the other day and wanted to do a quick write up. However, if you haven't heard of this little tool, let's back up slightly. It's essentially a little gadget that you plug into the back of your (newish) television - you have to have an HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) connection available, and you plug it in. You then go to the appropriate website on your desktop/laptop/tablet/smartphone and follow the onscreen instructions. When you've done all of that you can then 'cast' what you're seeing on the device directly onto your television. Consequently it's great for watching YouTube videos on a nice television sized screen, or watching films and so on. There are a bunch of apps in the Chrome store that work with the device, and you can add these to your laptop etc.

The installation was very easy. It really was just a question of following the onscreen instructions - it look longer to download the software than it did anything else. The gadget configured itself and the wi-fi connection - all that you need to know is your Router password details, and that's just about it. Once you're all set you see a cheery little icon sitting on your Chrome browser, or in your YouTube application etc which looks a little like this:

Make sure that you're on the correct tv channel for the HDMI port and you'll then see your screen being displayed on the television. Anything that you now do on your laptop etc. will appear on the television.

Libraries can use this in a variety of different ways. It's now really easy to cast your screen onto a television and you don't need to have an expensive projector - though I do readily concede that you need an expensive - or at least newish - television. It's going to be excellent to display presentations, training materials, videos, photographs and so on. A super little training tool in fact, as well as a promotional resource. If you only have a smartphone (Android or Apple) you can still show what's on the small screen onto something much larger.

There are some limitations - you have to have the Google Chrome browser on your computer/tablet/etc but that's only to be expected. In theory you can only cast stuff that you have available on the browser screen, but you can get around that, since there are apps that let you see more than a browser window - so the Chrome remote desktop app is great here - just allow your computer and laptop to talk to each other, and you can then take over the computer and cast what you're seeing onto the television. You could therefore show a game, the basics of another program; just about anything that you can see or use on your desktop can then be shown on the television. I did find that if you have a dual screen/monitor setup this particular app would show both, but that's easy enough to fix.

The price of this gadget is the princely sum of £30.00 and you can buy it from Amazon or all good technical stores, and probably some supermarkets as well now. Set up time from start to finish, for my laptop and tablet (iPad Air) was about 15 minutes, and most of that was just twiddling thumbs waiting for things to download or configure. It's such a cheap price for a really handy little gadget it's just worth getting for even occasional use.

May 28, 2014

If you need to find images that you can use legally (and for free!), I have always recommended Flickr, since they have a Creative Commons option - but it was hidden deep down in the Advanced Search function. Now they have actually made it much easier to find - simply run a search and check out the top of the screen - you should see a new option available:

May 27, 2014

A new scam going around Facebook at the moment is for the con artist to choose a particular individual, steal their profile photograph and then send friend requests to all of their friends. The idea is that you'll see the person, you know who they are (after all, you recognise their face right?) and you add them, perhaps not remembering that you've added them already. The fake friend then sends you messages asking you to like particular pages, or download a program, make contact with someone else and so on. You're more inclined to do this, because after all you know the person, they're trustworthy so you're inclined to go along with the request, leading you into a whole load of difficulties. I was fortunate enough to catch one of these 'live' last night, and I'll go through the whole thing with you, so you can see how it plays out.

The first thing that I knew was my friend - let's call her Fake Mary (which is a coincidence, cos that's kind of her name) sent me a friend request. I thought it was a bit odd because she was already a friend, but I decided to friend her anyway, just to see what would happen. She then popped straight into a Facebook chat with me, and the following is the transcript of our discussion. My extra comments on this [are in brackets].

Fake Mary: Hello

Me: Hi, how are you?

Fake Mary: Am fine, and you?

[At this point I really wanted to make doubly sure this was an imposter, so decided to check]

Me: Not too bad; was really good to see you last weekend; did you get home ok?

[Of course, I hadn't seen Mary last weekend, and the 'real' Mary would have commented on this. Instead, the attempted con starts straight off.]

Fake Mary: Good to hear from you. I'm doing good and very happy. Have you heard the good news about Agent Larry who works for the United Kingdom, USA, Australian, News Zealand and Canada government organization money grant program offer?

[This was the obvious line that convinced me that I was dealing with a con artist, since my friend would never have made such a statement, and she would never have used that terminology. However, since I was keen to see where this would lead, I wanted the con artist to continue.]

Me: No? Do tell me.

Fake Mary: Oh, I thought you have heard about it already. The money is from the federal government head office to help all the community. I think you have get the money already because i saw your name among the winnes list when the federal government agent brought cash to me and I wonder if you have got yours?

[I have transcribed this exactly as written, including the poor grammar. It's a fairly poor attempt at a con though - the 'federal government head office'? Please!]

Me: No! I haven't seen this; what should I do?

Fake Mary: It's a win money grant offer from the federal government to help and maintain the standard of living. I think you should contact the federal government agent that leads the ups to my door step on his face book contact page or email address. You could also download the program. Do you have the agent face book contact page link with you?

[It was at this point that a joint friend of Mary and myself messaged me - she'd seen that I had befriended 'Mary' and was warning me, which was very kind of her, and helped confirm (not that I needed any confirmation!) that this was indeed a con.]

Me: Not to hand, no. Can you give it to me?

Fake Mary: just click on this link and it will lead you to the federal government agent page that bring cash to my home on his face book page https://www.facebook.com/larry.few5 let me know when you have him up so i can tell you what to do next.

[That was where the fake Mary went out of the picture. I checked the profile page, and they'd done a runner, and all I was left with was the following:]

It was now time to track down 'Larry Few'. I went to the Facebook page and this is what I saw, though I have blurred out the face, since it's also been stolen - I'll come back to that.

I carried on the conversation with 'Larry'

Me: So tell me more about this opportunity

Larry: what is your full name so that i will check our list here if you name is there

[This guys English is even worse than the first one!]

Me: Phillip George Michael Bradley

[No idea how George Michael popped into my head - sorry George!]

Larry: congrats

Me: Yeah?

Larry: My name is Larry Few, I work for Federal Agency. We remember your Screen name on our list here and your money is available for you to claim. Let us know if you ready to claim the money

[Am I ready to claim the money? Ready? You bet I'm ready to claim the money!]

Me: Oh yes, I am absolutely ready to claim the money! What do I need to do?

Larry: Fill out the form below accordingly one after the other right now: Your Full Name:-------- Your Address----------- Your City----------- Your State-------- Zip code-------- Date Of Birth----------- Married/Single:----------- E-Mail Address------------ Phone number Text Number Number----- Occupation---------- Do you Own/Rent a House....... Male or Female---------- Are you Deaf or Hearing---------- Age------------ Do you want Cash or Check? Get back to us Asap. Regards Agent Larry Few. Get back to me in order to avoid unnecessary delays and complications.

This is of course a huge amount of personal information that any decent con artist could use to scam me, impersonate me and so on. It was at this point I broke it to him that his cover was blown. Within minutes the account was closed. What I also was doing while the chat was going on was to take a copy of the profile picture and run it through Google's image search to see if I could find any other similar ones. It turns out that the image is actually that of an American actor, and it had also been used fraudulantly in other places as well. Hence blurring it out here - no reason the poor guy should get associated with scams of this nature. I also emailed his agent to let them know.

I checked both accounts again today, and they have been closed. The fake Mary has disappeared, as has Federal Agent Larry Few. So, what can we learn from this:

If you see one of your friends friending someone, do exactly what MY good friend did for me, which was to alert me to possible danger.

Trust your instincts. Everything that Fake Mary was telling me seemed wrong - the language being used, the phrasing, the poor grammar, it all screamed con.

Report the account to Facebook, and also if you can, alert the friends of the fake account if you can, to warn them. If you want to play along for fun, that's up to you, but never give them any kind of real information at all. It's also worth telling your friends that you already have a Facebook account, and under no circumstances, add 'you' again.

So - a Facebook scam in action. It was fun to watch, but I was getting angry, since people are going to get taken in by this - just make sure that it's not you or your friends or colleagues!

May 21, 2014

Looking for a nice way to display tweets? Perhaps for a conference, event or just to keep tabs on a subject? Tagboard tries to solve this problem for you, by allowing you to create your own tagboard with its own URL. You can then display the page and see the new tweets as they come in. If you're interested, I created a tagboard for #libraries You can add in your own images to personalise it a bit more, but that's pretty much it. Very basic, and it doesn't let you filter any of the tweets at all, which may be a little embarrassing if someone has a grudge. However, if basic is all you need, this will fit the bill.

Increase your social popularity by using the right hashtags. People are still quite perplexed about hashtags and Twitter, but this tool might help out a bit. If you register with Sopularity via Twitter you can create your tweet, and ask it to give you some ideas on the hashtags that you should use. When you're happy with what you've got, tweet away. It looks like this:

There's an interesting mix of good tags and some 'WTF?' ones. It's a bit of a shame that you can't suggest your own, which would help the next person who uses similar words or concepts. You can upgrade to a commercial account for $5 a month for unlimited hashtag suggestions but to be honest if you can't find what you want yourself, maybe you shouldn't be tweeting in the first place?

This is very sad news. CompletePlanet, maintained by BrightPlanet provided access to over 100,000 databases linking users to deep web content. They have now closed the service because it's too costly and difficult to maintain. CompletePlanet was first started in 2000, and has been an excellent tool to assist searchers in finding good quality specialised databases. It will certainly be missed!

May 19, 2014

Funkyflick is a recommendation search engine that tries to find movies that you'll be interested in based on your likes - or indeed any subject matter that interests you. Type in your search term and Funkyflick will try to locate your interest on Wikipedia, and may well give you lots of alternatives. You do need to scroll down to find exactly what you want, because it arranges results alphabetically. Once you have located your subject of interest, the engine will return films based on that.

I did a search for 'London' for example, and got movie suggestions such as 'Passport to Pimlico', '10 RIllington Place', 'The Blue Lamp', 'Jubilee', and so on. I was then able to filter by genre or era. Each movie is represented by its poster, and there's a flyout dialogue box that tells you more about the film, based on a Wikipedia entry. You may also get a trailer, and you can share across social media.

There are a few glitches; I couldn't subscribe to find out more because the link wasn't working, I didn't like the fact that once you have done a search and clicked on a link, if you want to go back you've got to retype the entire search string again. There's also a daily limit of searches unless you subscribe - not a glitch of course, but irritating.

It's great fun and highly addictive, and certainly helps answer the question 'what film shall we watch this weekend?' They are promising the same service with books, and I can see how Funkyflick could be used by librarians to create 'viewing lists', promote DVD collections, suggest movies based on current news stories, link to things the library is currently promoting (World War One, anybody?) and so on. It's worth a look, and I'll be really interested to see how the book recommendation service comes along.

Twitter has introduced a nice feature called the 'mute button'. It's a feature that's in the same category as unfollowing someone or blocking them, but it's much more flexible. Let's briefly go through what they all do.

If you unfollow someone you're doing exactly that - you're not seeing the tweets that they post any longer. They don't get a message saying that you have unfollowed them, although there are plenty of tools available that will do that job for you - I use Friend or Follow for that but they will discover this if they try and send you a direct message, or look at their profile page and get prompted to ask if you want to follow them.

If you block someone that's a bit more extreme, because it means that they can't refer to you directly, though it's easy enough to get around that. They cannot add your account to any of their lists, have their @replies or mentions show in your mentions tab, they can't follow you, and they can't see your profile picture in their timeline, or tag you in a photograph. It's pretty much the nuclear option. In order to block someone, visit their profile, choose the 'gear' icon and choose to block them. You have to remember who you have blocked though, because Twitter isn't very good at telling you.

If you mute someone it means that you're still following them as normal, it's just that for a period of time you're not seeing their tweets. There are plenty of reasons why you might want to do this:

You follow someone because you 'have' to - family members, annoying work colleagues etc and it would be difficult or embarrassing not to follow them, yet you have no interest in what they are saying.

Someone may be at a conference that doesn't interest you and they're tweeting each session - you can mute them for the length of the conference, then unmute them afterwards.

You don't want to know the outcome of a particular result - your friend might be going to the game and their tweets may give away the result. Though in that case, just steer clear of the net and tv and radio I think!

To avoid their tweets on a subject that you don't like. Generally at the weekend I might tweet about football - if you don't want to see my tweets cluttering up your feed, mute me over the weekends!

To avoid being unfollowed. If you want to increase your follower count you might decide to follow a bunch of people, but you don't actually want to see their tweets. Rather a poor reason this one I think, but it's valid. By muting them you maintain the follower count but don't see the tweets.

In the middle of a personal dispute. If you have a relationship with a particular follower, and it's going through a rough patch you might just want to tone it down a bit by not seeing their tweets for a while, then picking up later.

There are probably more reasons, but those are the ones that came to mind. So, how exactly do you do it? Visit their profile page, or click on their user name to get their profile up. Then click on the gears (the same thing you do when you block someone) and you'll see something like this:

(I should point out that I'm just using this account as an example!) You click on the 'mute' option and then at the top of the screen will get the message:

If you look at their profile page again, you'll see that it's been clearly marked that they have been muted.

Just click on the icon and they'll be magically unmuted again. That's all that there is to it.

May 16, 2014

The need for good quality free to use images appears to be only matched by the number of different databases that keep springing up to provide them - usually as the loss leader into their commercial offerings. However, if you find the image that you want, and it's free, then all to the good. Here's a bunch of the latest:

Dreamstime. This has a small number of free images, and more can be purchased for about a pound each. Out of the 23,000,000 images available in total I found 16 tagged as 'books' and 12 as 'library' but while they were clear images and neat, they weren't particularly exciting. They do have a lot more which are 'royalty free' but that's not quite the same as 'free' since you still have to pay a fee to download them. You also have to register before you can download the free images as well.

Free Digital Photos. Generally the smaller version of an image is available for free, but larger versions require payment. However, there were almost 2,500 images for 'book' and 181 for 'library'. Large resolution images can cost between £5 and £15. I liked their selections - quite interesting and very different from the boring and predictable images you might imagine.

Free Images. Nice and straightforward to search, and 'book' gave me 1,000 images (photographs and clip art) which were free to use, with attribution back to the owner. 'Library' gave me 424 images, and these were also interesting and amusing, though a lot of the ones that I looked at seemed as though they would be more at home tagged as book, but there you go.

Free Range stock photos gave me 148 and 30 results, but I didn't find them very impressive, and a lot of the library ones appeared to be of catalogue card draws. The images also didn't look very sharp either, so I wasn't impressed.

New Old stock was great fun. It's a collection of vintage photographs 'from the vaults' with no known ownership and in public domain. Disappointingly there was only 1 book image and 0 libraries pictures, but its still worth a look. The search option is very easy to miss - it's in the top left hand corner.

Public Domain Pictures was a site that I liked. It described itself as "a repository for free public domain images. Download high quality HD photos or upload your own. Make money from your hobby, gain popularity and improve your photographic and graphic skills." I couldn't see how many images there were for my searches, but I liked the ones that I saw, and while they're free to use, you are encouraged to buy the photograph a 'cup of coffee' via their payment system.

RGB Stock has a very generous set of licence terms which allows you to do most things other than make money directly out of the images. I got 934 and 117 images for my two searches, and was pleased with the images that were returned - varied and of very good quality. You do need to register for free to download images though.

These are a few of the resources that I particularly liked from a larger collection of 53 resources in a blog post over on buffer, and if you found yourself with an appetite to look at more resources, head over to their post 53+ Free Image Sources.